You can see the embedded video here: Linda Jean Lee
Wow, the end of the summer really is here, and the official first day of class is (gulp)... tomorrow. I probably should have tried to get myself to write two of these InstCon posts per day back in the bliss of late July and early August! Anyway, I will write up the notes promised yesterday about @lindalee 's fantastic presentation on Blueprint Courses, which finishes up my Thursday morning InstCon adventures. Luckily, Linda has made my job that much easier by having shared her slides here already, and also with all the documentation she provided throughout the year as her program got their Blueprint Courses workflow up and running.
Lessons Learned from a Year with Blueprint Courses
... and the videos are out: video link. Although at first glance I don't think we can embed a video here (I was hoping for YouTube that we could embed), and I'm also not sure how we can link to specific videos. I'm having trouble navigating the videos too since I'm not sure how they are organized. I'll explore that and report back tomorrow, but for now I wanted to post about Linda's session.
There was a LOT of interest as you can see. (I'm there in my beanie with @bstachowiak in the front row.)
Even though I don't use Blueprint courses, I was really interested in hearing about Linda's experiences since this is a situation in which the LMS has some advantages, and Linda did a fantastic job of explaining just what goals they were trying to reach with their implementation of Blueprint courses last year. These were the main takeaways for me:
1. Power of InstCon. Linda began this project right after InstructureCon last year: that is really inspiring! So, even though it was a real time squeeze, she went back to Philadelphia and got this big experiment up and running, and now she is back at this year's InstructureCon to report on how it went. What a great spirit of learning!
2. Overlords and minions. Yes, this is unofficial terminology, but I love it! "Overlords" and "minions" is how the folks in Linda's shop use to refer to the parent-child courses (or whatever the official Canvas terminology is; I'm not sure).
3. Community shout-out. I really appreciated how Linda had a shout-out for @kblack 's contributions here at the Community about Blueprint courses. There is clearly a lot of interest in this (as the full room showed!), and I think it is great that people like Ken and Linda are so generous with their expertise all year round here at the Community; you don't have to wait from one InstructureCon to the next to learn about what they are doing. You can do that here at the Community right here, right now. And luckily "blueprint" is a great term to search on, pretty much unambiguous; here are the Community search results:
https://community.canvaslms.com/search.jspa?q=blueprint
4. Total process clarity. I would urge you to go through Linda's slidedeck to see the incredibly clear way she described their process in terms of goals, benefits, challenges, etc. Much like with the Broward County presentation, even though this was about a world and work that is very different from anything I do, I felt like I was able to understand the decisions they made and learn from the process. So kudos to Linda both for the really clear workflow at Wharton and also for her really clear presentation of that in her talk.
5. Ouch: no room! The session filled up, and there was someone who came and announced that nobody was allowed to sit on the floor because that would be a fire hazard (I think this is the session where they made that announcement). I heard from people and saw tweets about being turned away when other sessions were full likewise. That is a real problem, and all the more reason to make the videos as fully accessible as possible (more about that tomorrow). Especially if people were turned away from events and told to just watch the video later, I think that is all the more reason to make sure the videos are as open and easy-to-find and share as possible. And of course there are lots of other reasons for open sharinig too, totally aside from doing right by the people who found themselves turned away at the conference from the sessions they had come a long way to attend. I didn't have time to really explore the video collection yet, but I'll see if I can figure out how to make better use of those videos tomorrow.
Happy Back-to-School for all of you who are starting school tomorrow! 🙂
